We define the study of economics as the study of the dynamics of value. We will talk a lot about value and I have some very opinionated ideas about exactly how to define value. Regardless of your definition of value, Economics studies of how that value affects the value of other things in society. Traditionally, money vs. goods/services. I'm going to go deeper than this and look at value on many different levels and explore how we can use the patterns of the dynamics of value at lower levels of bootstrap to point us in the direction of reaching immortality at higher levels.
We define money as a tool. We get to design tools. The money of today has many differences than the money of yesterday and will have more differences from the money of tomorrow. We will discuss this more, but now I'll simply ask you to set aside your availability bias of greenbacks and banks and the FED and realize that we could implement many different systems of money.
Robert Pirsig would call it Quality. Christopher Alexander would call it wholeness. Eliezer Yudkowsky would call it...humanism? Whatever 'it' is, it is value. And we pay for value. Other forces pay for value as well. The actual currency involved in value exchange can vary greatly, but the end goal of the exchange does not vary. The agents desire more value. We will see that this universe ultimately has one goal, the development and expansion of value.
All value is future value. This will hold true until we find a way to overcome time itself. That may happen, but until then, all the value that we will experience resides in the future. Past value has gone and you cannot reconstitute it. You can't 'store' it. Well, you can, but only on certain levels and for certain purposes. Remember that if anyone ever tells you that they have a way for you to 'preserve value for the future' they probably have something to sell you. Don't trust them.
One can 'pump water uphill' or store energy in chemical form in rapidly extractable ways, but even pure energy can fluctuate in value drastically under the right circumstances. We should still make 'good bets' on value. Sometimes the universe presents these bets to us as our only option.
I'm greedy. I want to live forever. I want to experience it all. Death may lie in wait for my mind, but I will not go quietly into the night. See Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality - Chapter 39. http://hpmor.com/chapter/39